Month: May 2010

Appropedia has grown rapidly in multiple dimensions since our early days, and especially in the past several months. Both the volume and range of activity at Appropedia.org is up significantly. We have content translation activity, content porting activity, partnership activity and site technology development activity all expanding in parallel. Twitter and Facebook communities have grown dramatically as well.

In addition to all the active participants, we have a lot of eager supporters that haven’t yet identified the best way to engage. We get notes like “I love what you’re doing! What can I do to help?” And for every explicit offer, we know there are many more unspoken. To make better use of all this pent up energy and goodwill, we are beginning a new program for engaging volunteers, both new and veteran.

The Appropedia Initiatives program is an open-ended series of specific activities that will benefit a lot from community engagement. Each Initiative will be designed to attract a critical mass of contributions and enthusiasm, in order to build momentum on a particular topic or practice. We know that our community of supportive people has a great variety of skills, and we envision a broad variety of Initiatives to engage as many people as we can. Some Initiatives will be focused on the Appropedia.org site (either content or technology), and others will be more community oriented. Essentially, Initiatives are ordinary Appropedia activities that are likely to have some broad interest. Like most things at Appropedia, users input and ideas will define the path for the Initiatives program. To get things started we have about three Initiatives lined up, and a bunch of loose concepts semi-identified.

Our first Initiative is very timely. We quietly began prototyping a “Travel Intern” program a few weeks ago, and there are several ways that the Appropedia community can help. We will launch that Initiative very shortly and a few weeks later we will launch Number 2. Each new Initiative will be highlighted on the Appropedia main page, and we will do community outreach in the form of blog posts and tweets to make sure that every gets a chance to see it. Naturally, we welcome your help in passing the word, and identifying people, partners and resources appropriate for each Initiative.

The goal is for each Initiative to take on a life of its own and to continue for months beyond its initial moment in the spotlight. To make sure that fledgling Initiatives have a good chance, we’re asking that each Initiative should have some semi-committed support in the form of a “Initiative steward” who will shepherd the activity for at least 3 months. Through the magic of open collaboration and search-engine-optimization, an Initiative that gets off to a solid start will stand a good chance of gathering other support. Check out the provisional guidelines for Appropedia Initiatives and see whether your favorite topic or project might be a good candidate for an Initiative. If so, create a launch page and add your Initiative to the list!

I hope you’ll indulge me for a moment; this post is more personal than my usual content.

This past weekend, I participated in a group retreat (more details here) that I engaged in for two specific reasons. I wanted to experience more joy in my life (which is already fantastic), and I wanted to eliminate my internal barriers to leadership that I have recognized impede my participation at Appropedia.

Well, I have good news to report! My connection to Joy has become a vast channel, and my acceptance of my own Power is now deep and strong, where formerly it was very limited. This blog post captures some of both for me, because I can feel the ecstasy and boldness in the content.

I want to share this joy and power with everyone in the Appropedia community, and express my appreciation to all of you for enabling Appropedia to do what it does. Appropedia’s ability to manifest positive change in our world is clear to me, and I look forward to engaging much more fully (most visibly through more posts, but in other ways as well).

I invite you all to join me in experiencing the Joy and Power that comes from using collaboration to build rich sustainable lives.